Consider this chain of events

mkdir annex
cd annex
git init
cd ..
mkdir annex.git
cd annex.git
git init --bare
cd ../annex
git annex init stuff
git remote add bare ../annex.git
git push bare master

Now I decide to not use git in my annex directory and remove the .git directory from annex. Then if I were to do a

git clone host:annex annex-clone

git gets a bit too clever and skips over the annex directory and goes straight to annex.git. Although some people might like this behaviour, I would prefer that git should do what it is told and spit out an error to me saying that host:annex doesn't exist.